


Light in the Hearth

by windyautistic



Category: Green Lantern (Comics)
Genre: Gen, POV Outsider, author channels emotions about homes into fic news at 11, canon characters show up for all of five seconds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-08
Updated: 2020-04-08
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:06:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23550520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windyautistic/pseuds/windyautistic
Summary: first fic i've ever posted and it's a loosely edited stream of conciousness draft. woo?
Comments: 6
Kudos: 6





	Light in the Hearth

**Author's Note:**

> first fic i've ever posted and it's a loosely edited stream of conciousness draft. woo?

Dad, in his infinite wisdom, had decided to slowly die in Florida. She'd hated him for it at the time. It wasn't that Carrie hated her dad, she just had figured Florida was about the worst place on earth to slowly rot away from cancer, barring perhaps central Australia. Actually, no. In central Australia, there was a chance you'd die kicked to death by a kangaroo, a death so stupid it wrapped around to being a decent enough way to die.   
But as it was, Dad had chosen Florida, and so to Florida Carrie went, packing up most of her life in Coast City to live in the guest room of Dad's old house and do puzzles, read books, and shit talk all the other old white people who came to slowly die in Florida.

It was two weeks later when they'd been on their third puzzle of the day, when the news came on about some kind of alien ship over Coast City. Carrie had watched in rapt horror as the broadcast cut out, and gripped her dad's hand tight enough to bruise as news crews from further out came on the scene with cameras.  
She'd cried in her dad's arms as the news went on into the wee hours of the morning, showing footage of the crater that had been her home.  
Over the next two weeks, Dad had held her as she cried, helped her make up a list of everyone she knew, had to try and find, somehow. The reports said up to 8 million were missing or dead, and though that got pared down over the weeks to 7 million dead or unaccounted for, it was still unbelievable.  
  
Dad had suggested that she journal and write about what she remembered, so she wouldn't worry about forgetting it. She did it every night for seven months, in between navigating the paperwork for financial support, since her house and life had gone up with the city, and watching Dad get ever weaker and more tired. One hot, windy morning, he just didn't wake up. She hoped it hadn't hurt him, seeing her as she was while _he_ was the one dying.  
She'd had the funeral (surprised at the number of people Dad actually _knew_ , she'd always been mildly convinced his life's calling was a hermit), done her time for the inheritance paperwork and all that came with it, and sold Dad's house.

She couldn't go home, but like hell she was staying in Florida.  
Apparently, other Coast City survivors had moved en mass to Gateway City, since it wasn't too far and had a similar atmosphere. Carrie couldn't have handled it, being back in California, but not _home_. So, because as her mom had told her, she "saw the sensible thing and drove the other way", Carrie moved to Gotham. The whole of America between her and Coast, but the ghosts still haunted her. Her childhood friends, the guy who'd run the convenience store near her house, the lady who lived next door in her apartment complex who was always baking some thing or another... gone.

* * *

Gotham was... fine. If you didn't mind occasional killer clown rampages, bottle water advisories, and a bay that she was pretty sure would give the horseman of pestilence pause. She worked odd jobs, made rent, and passed the time. It was fine.  
Then, six years after Coast went up in ash and smoke, so did Gotham.  
  
It wasn't the same, of course. Gotham had only been hit by an earthquake, an earthquake on an old town with city planning that hadn't been up to code even when the settlers first built it. and Gotham hadn't been her home, so much as where Carrie happened to sleep and live, for a time. So she grabbed what she could and evacuated, and watched the barbed-wire fence go up and the bridges get bombed out as Gotham city was declared to be no man's land.  
She couldn't stand staying in one place, after that. So she found a trucking company, got her licence, and hit the road. It wasn't all bad, she got to see a lot of unique places, and a lot of _phenomenally_ tacky tourist traps.  
  
Then, after 5 years of crisscrossing all of America and some of Canada, she found herself back in California, with a severance cheque and an apology for the abrupt closing of the company.  
She'd taken the cheque, sighed at her luck, and crashed at a cheap hotel when the news chattering in the corner caught her attention.  
**US GOV'T REBUILDING COAST CITY**  
_Stupid. So stupid to care this much._ But she'd cried the whole night when she saw it, bought the cheapest car she was sure would hold up the whole way, and drove to Coast City, as fast as she could.  
It was surreal, seeing it. achingly familiar street layouts ( _why and how had they recreated them?_ ), the view of the ocean... So few buildings, though. Most of them were skeletons of buildings, or temporary things, housing the small army of construction workers.  
She didn't care, though. Carrie was back, and Coast City was too.  
  
It had turned out that the last 5 years of your resume being "drove a truck into the unending desert" wasn't a _fantastic_ selling point, but a construction company decided to hire Carrie on anyway, and she got herself a house. _a house!_ Not a rental, or a mobile home, a real house that was all hers.  
She'd gotten used to the strange emptiness of a city being built so few people in it. There were some, obviously. Ian, who ran the corner "everything except drugs" store, and told her stories of being on at his brother's wedding when it happened. (They never needed to specify what "it" was, they all knew. Almost nobody there in those early days hadn't lived in coast Before.) One night, early on, when she'd hung around after closing, Ian had suggested she come with to a local bar.  
_Why the hell not?_  
  
The bar was called "Phoenix", because apparently subtlety was for the young. The owner was a woman who couldn't possibly be younger than 70, but had enough energy to carry the place herself. She'd introduced herself as "Gin, short for Gin rummy", and nobody was brave enough to ask if it was a joke. Gin had been just barely out of town, visiting a friend when it all happened, and had lived not too far away from the crater all these years. The town coming back, she's said, was inevitable. You couldn't keep Coast City down.

  
Carrie went to the Phoenix often, after that. She'd sworn off alcohol, after nearly losing her truck and her life to it, but soda went just as well with stories as anything else. Most of the regulars were survivors too, and the nights often turned into a bittersweet reminiscing. They'd tell stories, mostly personal ones, and one guy (Tom, he'd introduced himself as) always had the best and wildest about their old city superhero, the Green Lantern. Carrie had never paid much attention to the guy at the time, really. But she couldn't help but wonder now, had he gone up with the city? Missed it, but never came back? She didn't much follow the superhero news, but she didn't even see him whenever the Justice LLeague would thwart some alien invasion or world-conquering scheme, even.

  
One night some weeks later, she'd been talking to Tom outside when the a green light flew by overhead, and Tom had called out and waved. Carrie managed to kludge her surprise into what she hoped was a tactful "wait holy fuck how was he not dead?" and Tom had laughed until he cried, Carrie assumed at her poor phrasing. After collecting himself, he'd shrugged and said 'well, if Coast could come back, why not the Lantern?'. She'd been far too tired to poke holes in that logic, frankly, and had walked home. Stranger things had happened, she guessed, though she'd be hard-pressed to think of _when_.  
  
The rebuilding had slowed to a crawl, and people were starting to doubt that Coast could come back at all. Carrie wasn't one of them, in her famed stubbornness she'd said nothing, _nothing_ could make her leave again. Apparently the universe saw fit to test that.

  
Aliens were massing over Coast City. not just Coast, either. New York, Metropolis, everywhere. The news footage was blurry, and mostly just explosions, yellow, and aliens, but it was clear what was happening, all over again. Carrie flipped off the sky and headed to the Phoenix.  
  
It looked like some of the others had the same idea, and there was a nervous energy running through the bar, hour after hour. The energy finally snapped, though, when after a particularly big explosion in the distance, the tv started glowing green. Onscreen, the Green Lantern said that Coast was in danger, and they'd have to evacuate.  
The bar sat in silence, for a few moments. Finally, gin broke it with a loud "FUCK THAT, nightlight! We're not leaving even if the sky is falling on our heads!" The bar erupted into cheers, and a few people went outside to flip off the aliens properly.  
Then, they came rushing back in, not even two minutes later, rambling over each other about some great idea and flashlights, until somebody finally got them to take turns. Someone had been shining a green light out their window, as a sign that they weren't going anywhere. The room got even louder as the idea sunk in, and people hastily paid their tabs and ran home. "Evacuate?" Fuck that, green nightlight! they were Coast City, and they weren't going _anywhere._  
  
The weeks that followed seemed surreal. The Green Lanterns (as Carrie found out, not superheroes so much as... space cops? From what she'd overheard at the Phoenix, it seemed close enough) had stayed to help the rebuilding, and the yet more surprising, _new_ _building_. The story of Coast's display of bravery during the invasion, or as Ian called it, "granite-for-brains stubbornness" had resonated all over, and people were flocking to Coast City (and its new moniker, "The City Without Fear") in droves. Carrie actually ran into Green Lantern ( _their_ Green Lantern, not the other ones, or the aliens) at work one day, as he caught a falling crane. She'd hollered across the frame of the building that he'd been an idiot to think anyone would leave, and he laughed, fully doubled over midair, and said he'd been informed. She gave a thumbs-up as he flew away.  
It was nice to have a home again.

**Author's Note:**

> one day i will return to edit and flesh this out. one day.


End file.
